Gutenberg. The death of WordPress

I remember when I first showed my mom a smartphone. “What the hell do I need THAT for?” You should see her now. Getting her off Facebook is like trying to get a politician to quit lying.

I remember when Twitter came out.

“This is so stupid. Why would anyone care what I’m doing?”

We see where that went.

And yes, yes… I even remember when the internet came out.

(Old jokes will get you BLOCKED! :D)

There were people who said it’d never be a “thing”.

People are so often horribly, awfully, terribly wrong about technology and what they will and won’t use. Like really, really bad.

Enter WordPress Gutenberg.

People HATE this thing.

Just check out some of these “reviews” on the repository:

“The update NOBODY wanted.”

“This is like hell in WordPress.”

“Please let us keep using Classic Editor!”

You’ve got articles speculating that Gutenberg will be the “death” of WordPress.

Gimme a break.

Funny thing is…

Before Gutenberg, if you ASKED people about the classic editor and TinyMCE… they’d have ranted and raved at you for an hour about how awful it was.

Now, it’s this amazing thing we shouldn’t DARE change.

In any case, my challenge for you and all these people is simple. Use Gutenberg for a week to create all your content in WordPress. Then, switch back to the Classic Editor.

I guarantee you you’ll go, “Eh. This sucks.”

It’s not even close.

So, no.

Gutenberg won’t be the death of WordPress.

In fact, I predict that a few years from now, WordPress will be stronger than ever… in part thanks to Gutenberg. And, we’ll look back at this and wonder why we fought it at all.

But hey… I’m sometimes wrong.

So, we’ll see.

In any case, if you’re ready to just dive in and learn this thing and want a no-look pass, I just launched a new course on Gutenberg. And, you can get access to it for the big double zero over on SkillShare.

4 Comments on “Gutenberg. The death of WordPress”

Mohn Jorris

December 8, 2018 at 8:50 pm

The only thing laughable here is this smug, horrible take. That’s what cracks me up.

Gutenberg is a clunky, horrible mess. I can see how the childish building block approach might appeal to an arrogant prick like yourself who believes that every sentence deserves a new line, but to real content creators who actually know how to write, it’s a nightmare. An actual blog, an actual article…something you clearly know nothing about, since you’re committed to this self-congratulatory “I’m smarter than everyone else” drivel you laughably call a blog.

I’m sure you’ll offer up some snarky reply about how it’s for developers and whatnot, forgetting that it’s also about the end-user and content creators. Of course, looking at what you’ve designed here, it’s clear that you don’t really know much about quality content or good design. More’s the pity.

In short, your take is bad, and you should feel bad. Sadly, you won’t. You’ll dismiss this as “hating”, just as you’ve dismissed all the valid criticisms of Gutenberg because, I don’t know, using it makes you feel special, important, and superior? I’m only guessing, but based on the attitude of this post and others you’ve made, I feel it’s a pretty accurate one. But hey, you do you, pal.

Thank you for posting this John. Glad you are doing a course on this! It will be so important this coming year when a large portion of capable WordPress users abandon the platform, or refuse to support it any longer due to Matt & Co. rolling out an arbitrary bungled mess. I will agree though that Gutenberg is great for really old people, who don’t understand how the internet or web pages work, or for small children. For the rest of us who are not casual ad-whoring bloggers, Gutenberg is the newer, younger sibling born late into WordPress’s middle ages, with an obvious extra chromosome. Nothing personal, and I may end up taking your course if no other long term solution is available in 2019. Cheers!